Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

We had taken shelter in a maze of alleyways in one of the East End’s most notorious slums. It had been Fagin’s hinterland in the days of my empire, his base of operations, where the children were trained as fine-wirers and cutpurses. We had been retreating by degrees as the enemy, quietly and insidiously, grew in power. Now the streets were dark, deserted. The only shapes that moved did so jerkily, with a stiffness of limbs and a vacuity of eyes, and we avoided their patrols, hiding until they passed. Jack. Jack was somewhere out there, a spider in its web – what had Holmes called me? I missed Holmes. I missed all of it. The great game we used to play.

‘Where are we going?’ Fagin whispered. I exchanged a glance with Moran, who grinned in savage amusement.

‘Do you know how to catch a tiger, Fagin?’ I said.

‘Professor?’

‘The way to catch a tiger is to offer it something it wants,’ I said. ‘Hunters, like our friend Colonel Moran here, would tie a living goat to a tree and lie in wait nearby. The goat would cry in fear, until the tiger came. Do you understand?’

I could see the confusion in the poor man’s eyes. ‘But where will we find a goat at this time of night? In the East End?’

I sighed. I liked Fagin, he was a good worker, and he had no morals of which to speak.

‘Not a goat, you fool,’ I said. ‘A man.’

Something must have finally registered. His eyes flashed. He began to turn towards me and there was a knife in his hand. Then Moran knocked him on the back of the head with the butt of his air rifle, and Fagin slumped unconscious to the ground. Moran picked him up, grunting at the weight.

‘Do you know the place, sir?’

‘The church,’ I said. ‘By the old Ten Bells. That’s Jack’s point.’

He nodded wordlessly. He hefted the unconscious Fagin over his shoulder and we began to make our way towards the church on Commercial Street.

The night was thick with silence. They were close. I could feel them, watching, sniffing, waiting: waiting for me.

Holmes died first.

I took savage satisfaction from the fact, even as the world I knew was coming silently to an end.

The meteorite streaked across the sky. From this close I could see its malevolent evil, the malformed shape of the rock spinning as it burned through the Earth’s atmosphere. Who could survive such a journey? All my planning, all my notes and schemes, have revolved around an enemy immeasurably powerful, yet fundamentally known . They would have machines, great and terrible machines to protect them from our hostile, alien environment. They’d have great tripod-like machines to scour the land, and death rays to cause unbearable destruction. All tools I could use, myself. Once my men had killed the invaders, using the power of surprise, I would have their technology, I thought. I would rule not from the shadows, but from the throne! And the British Empire – my empire – would rule the entire world – perhaps even beyond!

The meteorite streaked across the sky and burst towards us like a fist. I heard screams, onlookers running. I expected the jolt of impact, the shock of an earthquake, yet I stood my ground. Then, impossibly, the meteorite seemed to slow as it passed through the air. For a moment, it hovered above us. It felt – as irrational as this may seem – as though that misshapen lump of rock was grinning .

Then it floated down and settled on the ground, as gentle as a feather. Nothing moved. There was no sound.

No hatches opened. No terrible machines emerged. Against the fence where he was leaning, Sherlock Holmes began to laugh.

‘Why aren’t they shooting?’ I said. I was speaking to Moran. ‘Why aren’t they shooting ?’

Of my men there was no sign!

‘Why won’t they shoo t! Shoot , you d—ed c—ks—s, shoot!’

Holmes’s laughter grew in volume and intensity. The man was quite deranged. Hysterical laughter spilled out of him and he shook, helplessly. The silent meteorite sat there on the ground of Horsell Common, still glowing red as though from some inner source of light. As I watched, thin tendrils of smoke, like questing tentacles, rose out of the rock and into the air. The red mist thickened, spreading in all directions away from the rock. One questing tendril reached Holmes. It seemed to tickle him, behind the ear, and Holmes giggled girlishly.

Then, it entered him – penetrated him! – and Holmes screamed, a horrible, wordless cry.

I saw his man, Watson, bolt and run. Holmes began to shake, the questing tentacle rummaging inside him, studying him, knowing him.

Until it’d had enough.

Abruptly, and with a soft, wet popping sound, Holmes exploded.

Wet bloodied pieces of Holmesian matter flew everywhere like whale blubber; a piece of kidney hit my cheek and slid sadly to the ground. I wiped my face with my handkerchief.

‘Professor?’ Moran said.

I stared, dumbfounded, at the silent rock. The bloodied miasma of that unnatural, evil fog continued to rise. Its tendrils reached the trees and pulled . I saw my men emerge from the cover of the foliage, their faces blank, their motions jerky, uniform. They were led by red trails of smoke that were, I realised, like leashes around their necks.

An eerie silence had fallen over Horsell Common. And I realised I had underestimated these Marsian invaders.

Then, hovering out of the mist, I saw a great big sucker form. It darted towards me with a sinuous motion, as though coming for a kiss.

‘Run, you fools!’ I said. ‘Run for your lives!’

And so, all dignity forgotten, and the remnants of Holmes’s internal organs still on my face and clothes, I ran. I, James Moriarty, Ph.d., FRS, Chair of Mathematics at the tender age of only twenty-one and, since those long gone days, the greatest criminal mastermind the world had ever known – I ran!

There were lights behind the windows of the Ten Bells pub. They were a wan red colour, and moved with some inhuman, yet intelligent, purpose. Fagin had recovered consciousness by the time we arrived. Moran tied him securely with a rope to the gates of the brooding church. What priests there were inside this grand edifice no longer worshipped God as any human could conceive it. Poor Fagin cried most bitterly. As we left him there, he began to hurl insults and curses at our backs.

We took shelter in the fallen-down remains of Spitalfields Market across the road, and waited. Moran had his air rifle out, and aimed the sights at poor Fagin’s forehead.

‘I never liked him,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Poor Twist.’

‘Poor all of us, when you come to think of it,’ I said.

We lapsed into silence. It felt as though we were intruders in some dark, alien world, of the sort that philistine fool, Wells, wrote of in his little stories. Here and there bands of possessed creatures, barely human any more, moved about their masters’ unfathomable business. Fagin had stopped screaming. He must have realised he would only draw the tiger to him quicker. He now subsided into muffled moans, more eerie than his shouting had been. His was the sound of a trapped and wounded animal. The sound of the human race itself, I thought, in a rare moment of fancy.

Make no mistake – it was the Marsians’ final goal: to rule us all, to control the world! Only Moran and I stood in their way – unlikely defenders of humankind.

We had been running the Resistance for six months, yet we had been thwarted at every turn.

Moran and I were now all that remained.

The morning after the Marsian landing, Moran went to collect the papers while I reclined in bed. When he returned, his face was troubled. I looked at the front pages, yet there was no mention of the meteorite strike of the night before; no mention had been made of Woking, of Horsell Common, not even of that oaf, Holmes, and his untimely – if personally, to me, quite satisfying – death.